Items to share: 26 May

Education Focus

• School inspections: can we trust Ofsted reports? (British Politics and Policy at LSE)

• And David Stone, referring back to last week's re-posting of a critical piece about Ofsted draws my attention to this piece: Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome (Ars Technica) (Many thanks, David!)

• Are we asking the right questions? (Boston Globe) On the art of asking questions in order to learn, and explicitly teaching it.

• Lessons from Room 10  ...on the importance of high expectations.

• Google releases new research tool  and  Google Docs Research Tool: A Review (Chronicle of Higher Education) Not really much of a leap forward--particularly if it helps students to be even lazier...

• Study Shows Promise and Challenges of 'Hybrid' Courses (The Chronicle of Higher Education)  And another report of the same study: Report: Robots stack up to human professors in teaching Intro Stats (Inside Higher Ed ) Sounds like a reasonable study, for once, but it's interesting that it's about a traditionally dull but required course.

• The road to academic success is paved with stylish academic writing (British Politics and Policy at LSE)

Other Business

• The descent of Edward Wilson by Dawkins.This is shaping up to be a great spat! Watch this space.

• The Zombie Within : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR On knowledge and skills becoming second nature--"unconscious competence".

• Experimental psychology: The roar of the crowd (The Economist)  A new one for the research methods module--crowd-sourced experiments on the net-- with potential to overcome the WEIRD selection bias in most Western psychological research. (You'll have read the piece to find out what the acronym means.)

• Essentialism (Edge Conversation)  Bruce Hood: what if the "self" is not real?

• The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning (Brain Pickings)

• Mind-Pops: Psychologists Begin to Study an Unusual form of Proustian Memory: Scientific American

• Infographic: When The Lights Go Out, The World Eats Junk (Co.Design)

• New word order - FT.com On the challenges of translating literature 

• The Hot And Cold Of Priming (Science News) Among other things, more interesting points on the unreliability of the published research base in social sciences.

• What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum |(Articulations)

• The Benefits of Being Bilingual (Wired Science)

Asides

• Greatest wedding proposal ever: the lip-dub - Boing Boing

• Random Wodehouse Quote Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the pointer.

• Yoram Bauman the 'Stand-Up Economist' at Lancaster University Management School - YouTube

• Epic video of a Slinky on a treadmill